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Matt Brown and Mark Slater, writing about music and things. Looks set to be like a cracking little blog.
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Reviews of Phill Niblock's "Touch Three": drones created by stripping out attack/release/breath sounds from acoustic performers, and then gluing them together. What we're listening to right now, too. (It is better than that description makes it sound).
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This is, in fact, the most successful rotary encoder code I've found to date.
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Excellent summary of what happened on the Yaroze – and a quest to track down all the released Yaroze titles.
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Jason Rohrer's recursive shooter, which I must pick up at some point.
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"‘In the winter dusk, at successive stations, we peer out to see the wives waiting behind steering wheels, children scuffling in back seats. Daddies descend and are met. Each set of participants knows only of its own little scene … Each welcomed father ought not to learn of the existence of dozens of others along the line, any more than a prisoner should hear of the execution of his fellows.’" Joe Moran on "Notes from Overground". This sounds great.
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“Cartography used to be both an art and a science. I wanted to return to that.” This was my present to myself, as a souvenir, from SF. Looking forward to reading it properly – especially all the areas I never had a chance to visit – and can already confirm the maps are gorgeous. But really, it's about the whole package.
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"If thousands and thousands of people are making games, then it's entirely unimportant if 99% of them are absolute garbage. That top 1% will still consist of plenty of games for us to play, and they'll be great." Lots of great quotations in this smart post from Bill Harris; this is just one, but I recommend the whole thing.
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"Boilerplate is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it's just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed." Good documentation, lots of neat tricks in here, and some good jumping-off points for further research.
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"…if the Mac App Store is only populated by a subset of today’s Mac software, a few key points (such as “Inexpensive”) still won’t be true. This is why I believe that the Mac App Store will be dominated by (and become known for) apps that don’t exist on the Mac today." This is really good. It might even be right; regardless, it's thoughtful and well-argued.
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Not a bad list, especially for sites needing hardcore, tight, front-end work, and that are going to face load.
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Mitu makes a series of interesting connections here, though the conclusion she came to isn't quite the same as mine – which is in the comments. But there's a mass of starting points here as to notions of the "abstract", and what it might mean for games. Something I shall be returning to, for sure.
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Nice write-up of the making of (the marvellous) Trainyard, both in terms of polishing and marketing.
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"One million changes, nearly three thousand developers… At the end of the day, we just sail and log our collective journey through the Sea of Changes to the software commons." Very nice, and as James said: yep, he gets it.
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"Consider the process of writing the Readme for your project as the true act of creation. This is where all your brilliant ideas should be expressed. This document should stand on its own as a testament to your creativity and expressiveness. The Readme should be the single most important document in your codebase; writing it first is the proper thing to do." I like this: after all, a README is basically the story you tell about your software. Why not write it before the software exists?
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"It’s important to note that this number does not reflect either the number of people owning a mobile phone and that the United Nations Millennium Declaration remains a crucial milestone to reach for the mobile industry. However it shows that homes, bridges, cars, laptops and netbooks, white goods, plants, spimes, and other objects have a mobile phone subscription and are likely to become the most important target segment for mobile operators around the world." Which begs the question: how do you market to things?
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It Just Works and is good.
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Learning datamining, using the WoW Armory as a data set.
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"This page documents the web API calls that allow you to retrieve information from the item system in Team Fortress 2." Steam now has a Web API. Ooooooooh.
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"This information describes how Free Range operates, both as a business and as a culture.<br />
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We're open-sourcing our business, from the site to the contracts to the philosopy. Value does not come from these things, but from putting these ideas into practice. These ideas are not assets – we, the people, are.<br />
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Fork this." Free Range have put their manifesto and operating principles onto Github.